The Free Webhost Runaround

First off, I apologize for not being here lately. I've had some sort of persistent, cold-like symptoms all weekend, and I stayed home sick from school today. I haven't really done anything this weekend; my All-State music auditions, church, CYO (which is pretty much Sunday school), and school were all canceled. It started with a bloody nose on Saturday morning, and... well, I'm sure you don't want the details. The good news is that I'm starting to improve.

Now, earlier today I was searching the web looking for a good website host. I figured most anything was going to be better than Verizon's packaged deal. They offer a pitiful 10 MBs of space, which will not cut it if I start uploading my programming stuff again. It didn't take long for me to realize how hard it is to find stuff for free, however. My needs started simple - I wanted at least 30-40 MBs of storage. I soon added a requirement that I just couldn't handle forced advertisements - If I could get an ad-free blog, why not an ad-free website? This, of course, narrowed my options considerably.

I found a few ad-free options with a good amount of MBs - some offered in the hundreds of MBs. But I scanned their terms and conditions, and a good portion of those placed restrictions on which files you could upload. Namely, most of them didn't allow .zip files, which was simply unacceptable. I also really wanted the convenience of FTP access. And then I also decided that I may want to experiment with PHP in the future, further limiting my choices. Eventually, I found this review site, which had many reviews and a detailed search engine. This made my search much, much easier.

Have I come to a final decision yet? Of course not, but I've narrowed it down to three. Ripway offers a 30 MB deal, and mentions my three biggies right on the main page, in the first paragraph. They seem the friendliest, too, but I worry that even 30 MB may not be enough. ZendURL, on the other hand, offers 200 MB of space and a rather long list of features I don't even know about. (Webalizer WHAT?) It seems like a better deal, for sure, but they also seem to have a bad rep for downtime and for littering popups behind-the-scenes, in the site control panel. They did add a second server recently though, so I'll have to keep an eye on that. The last one is Xanma Free Webhosting. They have the most space of all, 1 GB! But, it's hard to find info about them; only four people have reviewed them and their "about us" page just says "Coming soon." Plus, you can tell they're not U.S. natives. When they mean to say something like "we apologize for the inconvenience", they say "Our excuses for the discomfort."

Well, that wraps things up. I hate doing the runaround like this, but you can't beat free :). At least getting a free domain name afterwards will be a piece of cake - dot.tk all the way!